The Best Request Is No Request, Revisited

Stefan revisits the web adage that the best request is no request at all… which is essentially why we ended up concatenating our CSS and JS and creating sprites for our UI images…. if you don’t have to make two http requests then don’t. Now, with http/2, is this approach still valid? Are our former best practices still best practices?

Over the last decade, web performance optimization has been controlled by one indisputable guideline: the best request is no request. A very humble rule, easy to interpret. Every network call for a resource eliminated improves performance. Every src attribute spared, every link element dropped. But everything has changed now that HTTP/2 is available, hasn’t it? Designed for the modern web, HTTP/2 is more efficient in responding to a larger number of requests than its predecessor. So the question is: does the old rule of reducing requests still hold up?